Get out your clippers, it's sideways brohawk time

I wasn’t able to attend SXSW because one of my stupid friends got married like an idiot, but virtually everyone I heard from who saw Attack the Block, the Edgar Wright-produced tale of an alien invasion striking a South London housing project, said it it was the movie of the festival.  At the time, it didn’t have a distributor, and there was even talk of possibly adding subtitles to make the British slang and accents more comprehensible to American viewers.  (Also, can you make them look fatter in post?  Otherwise I fear people will be confused.).

If you know anything about headline-question-mark etiquette, you already know we don’t have an answer to the subtitle question, but we do know that Screen Gems will handle theatrical distribution.

Sony announced today that they have picked up the film and that Screen Gems will distribute it; there’s no release date yet in place, but it sure seems like a good late-summer offering to me. Here’s what Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper had to say about the film: “Steve Bersch screened this film for me and I fell completely in love with it. The film is, at once, charming, scary, funny, hip, clever and completely hits its mark. I hope this is the beginning of a long relationship with these incredibly talented filmmakers.” [CinemaBlend]

It seems the sideways brohawk rally helmet I’ve been wearing has worked.  And I should hope we won’t be needing subtitles. I understood everything in the trailer fine.  I mean, it’s not like they’re speaking Scottish.  I would, however, welcome seeing an American film translated into Cockney gibberish.  “Oi, da puntah’s quaffed da wicket, ‘e ‘as!  Fetch da bobby’s knickaz, blokes, we’s snoggin’ lorrie crisps tonoight!”

Read the rest of this entry »

"Settle down, everyone, of COURSE I'm here for the gangbang."

You’ve probably noticed that just about any “raunchy” comedy is eventually available on “unrated” DVD. I always understood this as a way for the studios to sell you two of the same thing, but I also believed that it was also a chance for directors to include all the extra swearing and muff shots they’d originally intended but had to cut to get an R-rating from the MPAA.  It turns out the latter belief was just a fairy tale, like the female orgasm. As Phillips told a SXSW crowd this week, according to Movieline (his favorite site), directors usually aren’t involved at all:

Phillips’s beef lies with the widespread practice of selling unrated cuts of films on DVD, a marketing move that yielded an overly expository, seven minutes-longer cut of The Hangover and, he says, violates Director’s Guild rules.

“That’s something I have to take up with the DGA,” Phillips told a near-capacity audience at the Austin Convention Center. “Warner Bros., they’ll make your movie; your movie does well, and they want to create an unrated version, which is entirely against DGA rules because it’s not your cut. And they can’t call it the ‘Director’s Cut’ — they’ll call it ‘Unrated’ or some ridiculous term. Really all it is, is about seven minutes of footage that you cut out of the movie for a reason.”

“That won’t happen on Hangover 2,” he added. “The truth is that the unrated DVD, I probably could have killed, and they explained to me why they wanted to do it and what it meant as a marketing device. The fact that it ended up on HBO… was an incredibly large f*ck-up. That shouldn’t have happened. So that’s not going to happen again.”

I had a similar question about whether The Town “director’s cut” DVD was actually a cut Ben Affleck preferred or just an alternate cut they used to sell more DVDs, since the new version was so expository and lame that it actually made me wonder if my belief that Affleck was a solid director had been based on him just having really smart editors and producers.  Either way, both guys should be thankful they’re not working in porn, where, if you’re lucky, you get paid a grand or two to star in something you think is going to tasteful, and next thing you know your face is on the box for Fat Ugly Jizz Dumpsters 77.

UPDATE: Apparently this isn’t the “official” trailer. More on that here.

Hesher, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, finally has a trailer, and it puts me in a bit of a bind.  I’ve been pretty open about how much I liked this movie, but now the trailer has JGL taking a kick to the meat bucket at the 58-second mark, and we’ve long maintained that a nutshot in the trailer is the kiss of death for any movie.  But (500) Days of Summer had a retarded ending and people liked it anyway, probably because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Maybe JGL is so well-liked that he could actually transcend the laws of nutshots in movie trailers, thus rewriting the laws of the universe!  If he can pull this off, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s balls will have more indie cred than Ryan Gosling’s ukulele.  They could even start a band together called, uh… Balls and Sebastian.  Yeah, let’s go with that. (Wait no, “Dead Man‘s Balls?” Aw, forget it.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Rodriguez showed off a two-minute sneak preview of Predators at SXSW recently, and now it’s online.  Rodriguez produced, but the directing work was actually done by Nimrod Antal.  We get to see a couple new things from the new version, namely a new Predator guy with an arm-knife dealie, a triceratops thing, and a disturbing lack of mega-jacked army dudes.  Who are these slack-jawed f*ggots?  Pff, next you’ll try tell me that having 24-inch biceps doesn’t help you shoot guns better.  Whatever, dude.  Also, is it just me, or has Laurence Fishburne has been on the Luke Wilson fat face diet?

“Take the blue pill, Morpheus, it will suppress your appetite.”

Opens July 9th. [via /Film]

In Barry Munday, Patrick Wilson, aka Watchmen‘s Nite Owl, plays… uh… Barry Munday, a guy who lives for the smell of the sweet poontang, until one day, the father of a potential conquest beats his ass with a trumpet and he loses his testicles.  Pretty sweet premise so far, right?  I thought so.  You might think he’d be fine without his balls if he still has a wiener, but the truth is, the wiener’s pretty much useless without the balls.  They’re so big and ugly, but they do all the work.  When you think about it, they’re kind of like the offensive lineman of the genitals.

The twist is that he finds out he knocked up Judy Greer before he lost his testicles.  It’s a shame she isn’t playing herself, because it seems like her having a guy with no testicles around would be handy for when she has to take him to go see all those Katherine Heigl movies where she plays the kooky friend.  Anyway, Barry Munday plays at SXSW this month and it looks funny.  Now leave me alone.

RELATED ASYLUM POLL: Would you rather lose your testicles or your hands?